Call centers distribute calls and other types of communications to available service agents in accordance with various criteria. Call center agents are often grouped based on the skills of those agents in handling communications. Depending upon the needs associated with the particular skill, there may be a large number of agents in the skill group, or a small number of agents in the skill group. The latter are called small skill groups, and their associated agents are called small group agents. Such small skill groups may each typically contain on the order of two to ten agents, although other numbers are possible. As expected, a given large skill group typically comprises a substantially larger number of agents than a given small skill group, but the actual number in a particular group can vary depending upon factors such as the total number of agents in the call center. For example, in a call center with thousands of agents, a given small skill group may comprise a larger number of agents than a similar small skill group in a call center with only twenty agents. Thus, the terms “small group” and “large group” as used herein should be understood as relative terms, with the small group comprising a substantially lower number of agents than the large group. Of course, there may be multiple small groups and multiple large groups in a given call center, and a given agent can be a member of one or more small groups as well as one or more large groups.
A problem that arises in call centers with small skill groups is that the small group agents are often either underutilized or overutilized. Underutilization occurs when there are unduly restrictive barriers to using the small group agents to handle large group calls. Underutilization results in low occupancy and low productivity for the small group agents, and thus a higher cost per transaction for these small group agents. Overutilization occurs when the barriers to using the small group agents to handle large group calls are too easy to overcome. Overutilization results in high occupancy for the small group agents and poor service levels for the kinds of contacts that only the small group agents handle.
Conventional techniques for dealing with this situation may involve, for example, conditional queuing checks, multi-queuing, reserve agents, skill preference levels, and manual changing of agent skill settings. However, these and other conventional techniques fail to provide optimum usage of small group agents while avoiding any significant impact to service level targets or other performance objectives of the call center. More particularly, these existing solutions would generally cause either an overutilization or an underutilization of small agent groups, gaining productivity at the cost of poor service levels, or producing required service levels with poor productivity.
Accordingly, it is apparent that a need exists for improved techniques for handling small group agents in a call center.